Pre-Order The Day After (1983) (Blu-ray) Available for Preorder (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

The price link below will take you directly to the product on Amazon. If you are using an adblocker you will not see link.

 

[Johnny Angell]

I can still remember that very unsettling moment when they showed all the outgoing missle trails in the sky. It gave me unpleasant chills. Will have to wait for a better price.

 

[Dick]

If you're into the topic of nuclear war and its after-effects, I'd recommend THREADS over this, as it is much grittier and doesn't spend as much time on romantic sub plots. But THE DAY AFTER is certainly sobering, and if you forgive the inclusion of a dozen or so old atomic bomb test footage shots that you've probably seen fifty times before, the depiction of the blasts is grim indeed. Another highly recommended title is TESTAMENT (1983), which is a quieter, non-physical destruction program made for Public TV and starring Jane Alexander...this is perhaps the most devastating of the three. But it's a Paramount title and OOP on DVD. Amazon is streaming it for three bucks.

 

[Tino]

I would add the excellent HBO film By Dawns Early Light starting Powers Boothe and Rebecca Demornay.

It’s my favorite of all of them. So powerful. Wish it were available on Blu.

 

[The Drifter]

As a kid back in Fall '83, I started to watch The Day After, but my parents wouldn't let me finish this due to the graphic nature of the tele-film (I remember getting up to the point where Jason Robards & his daughter were in the museum). I wasn't happy about this at the time, but apparently a lot of other kids had the same experience - so I wasn't the only one.

Several years ago, I finally sat down & watched the entire film. And, I found TDA an extremely disturbing, horrific, and graphic film - I'm actually surprised that it came out on network TV at the time, due to the nature of the story/effects - if it had been in the theater, I'm sure it would have been rated R. It definitely seemed more like a big-budget, expensive Hollywood film than a TV movie.

This film did a good job of depicting what may have happened had there been a catastrophe like this back in the day; the scenes of people being incinerated in the blast(s) were quite chilling; also horrible were the scenes of destruction, & the bodies - especially the ones that had been flash-fried/charred but still intact -were quite grotesque. However, what really got me were the scenes of people dying of radiation poisoning - truly unerrving & horrific.

I felt the story was quite well-done as well, and understandably focused on those who were in the mid-west at the time (near the missle silo). I was also surprised that this tele-film had a lot of "big names", even by '83 standards - i.e. Jason Robards, Jobeth Williams, Steve Guttenberg - IIRC, all of them had been in films in the '70's and/or '80's. Surprised they were in a TV movie.

This was definitely an anti-war film, though at the time I didn't realize this.

It's also worth noting that the film-makers put a caveat at the end of the film - stating that if something like this were to happen, it would be much worse than what was depicted on-screen.

 

[Mark McSherry]

Not to get political, but one must remember the context when this aired. That goes a long way to explain why Hollywood was so eager to push THE DAY AFTER out to as many people as possible in as graphically grisly a TV movie as they did. And the lead up to its initial airing was controversial.

 

[Worth]

We may have this movie to thank for helping to de-escalte tensions during the height of the Cold War:

After signing a 1987 nuclear treaty with the Soviet Union’s Mikhael Gorbachev, Reagan sent a telegram to Meyer, saying, “Don’t think your movie didn’t have any part of this, because it did.”

https://www.avclub.com/the-day-after-traumatized-a-generation-with-the-horrors-1798447330